Assemblyman says party leaders playing games with spending records

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Assemblyman Anthony Portantino accused Democratic leaders Monday of “cooking the books” and misleading the public with legislative spending records that identified him as the lower house’s biggest spender last week.

At a news conference in his Capitol office, the La Cañada Flintridge Democrat cited the work of a Stanford University-based group of student researchers who documented what they described as “odd and peculiar” discrepancies between lawmakers’ expenditures, as detailed in records released late Friday, and the legislative payroll.

The group, named California Common Sense, compared the data, ranking Portantino in the middle of the pack when it comes to staff expenses in the 80-member body.

At issue is the Assembly’s long-standing accounting practice of reporting the salaries of some lawmakers’ office staff under the committees and caucuses that their bosses sit on and chair. Taken at face value, the spending records provide an incomplete picture of lawmakers’ expenditures, not connecting legislators with the budgets of their powerful leadership posts.

The Times and the Sacramento Bee have sued the Legislature over public disclosure, asking for a fuller accounting.

The dust-up is the latest chapter in Portantino’s feud with Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez, who called Portantino a profligate spender and slashed his office budget last month.

The fight has clearly gotten personal, with Pérez’s office comparing Portantino’s quest for the Assembly’s spending records to Donald Trump’s campaign for President Obama’s birth certificate. On Monday, an emotional Portantino, his voice quavering, invoked the Watergate scandal and said the Stanford group’s analysis “exposes the clumsy attempt of Assembly leaders to mislead the public.”

Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), chairwoman of the committee that oversees the chamber’s spending, denied the allegation, saying the Assembly had simply followed the same accounting procedure it has used for decades. Her committee voted 6 to 5 on Monday not to take up Portantino’s proposal for the Assembly to approve members’ office budgets in public and make them more equitable.

She said the measure would be considered as part of a larger study that Pérez has ordered on the Assembly’s records policies.

For now, lawmakers’ office and committee budgets are separated because they can lose their posts in the middle of a legislative session or be reassigned, she said. “There is nothing hidden,” Skinner said.

-- Michael J. Mishak in Sacramento